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jurassic

Here's a short list to get you started:

- Homeless issues. Mentally ill people pissing and defecating on the sidewalks in every significant public space.

- Vehicle vandalism is extremely common and unchecked by police.

- Extremely high income taxes with no perceivable difference in government-provided services.

- Property tax law that advantages long-term owners over young people trying to buy at today's inflated prices.

COVID added some new ones:

- Extremely high pre-COVID rents meant many adults were living in roommate situations that seem a lot less acceptable when your health is tied to the willingness of everyone in your unit to behave responsibly.

- Bars and restaurants that made the city attractive for many are now closed

- Public transit in crisis and may no longer meet your needs

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> Vehicle vandalism is extremely common and unchecked by police.

I believe the problem is more nuanced. I spoke with a retired police officer, and he said, "we can only give them a citation, and they [the vandals] know that, that they're gonna be out the same day."

In other words, the law is the problem, not the police.

"We can only give them a citation"? I think a big part of the issue is that the police almost never even do that much. They do zero. If you try to call this stuff in, they laugh at you.

I've called 3 times for 3 different broken windows on my car (a 2010 jeep - nothing special) and they literally just send you to an online form that automatically generates a generic police report. Insurance fraud here also has to be off the charts.

Because it would be a complete waste of time. The people have voted to decriminalize vehicle break-ins. Making the police to go through the motions when nothing's going to happen to the perpetrator would just be a waste of your own tax money.

>The people have voted to decriminalize vehicle break-ins

BINGO! Isn't there a really, really old saying about not crapping where you sleep?

This is going to get even worse under the new District Attorney.

No one is blaming the police officers. The police workforce is just a bunch of employees working for the government or the city.

If the same people were smashing the windows at Starbucks or Walgreens each day, the police response would suddenly be totally different.

The police prioritize protecting the property rights of large landowners, first and always. Don’t buy their excuses.

Wrong. A law was passed specifically making crimes of less than $1000 a misdemeanor.

Exactly. You can see loads of videos online of 5, 10 people, entering a regular Whole Foods or 7-Eleven and simply looting the place and leaving without pay. This kind of thing doesn't even happen in 3rd world countries like where I live, its's baffling to see what a huge american metropolis is allowing to happen in the name of political correctness.

This is actually really interesting. I don't think this is a problem with policing or political correctness. This is something I always think of when looting is mentioned: Most people reading this could walk into any grocery store (or Target, or auto parts store) and just purchase whatever they wanted without even thinking about the cost. For all practical purposes, in a software engineer's budget, expenses like that are a rounding error. My point is that the problems and solutions are usually a lot more complicated than they seem. The various social forces at work in SF are kinda crazy when you think about them.

It's not a matter of "affording" food/products or not. It's a political decision, to not prosecute people for crimes against property. And it's an extremely dangerous decision. The rule of law, and the freedom that societies that enforce it have, are inextricably linked. A government that does not protect the property of it's citizens has no right to exist. It's basically telling the ordinary citizen "you're on your own". What this type of goverment creates, either by stupidity or malice, is an anarchy fueled law of the jungle.

It works if you have a captive population and the people have no other choice. As this thread demonstrates, people are getting fed up and just leaving. If the city doesn't turn things around it will setup a downward spiral that's very hard to get out of. I think that's a real risk for a post-covid comeback, if it gets bad enough after all the people making the city great have left then it just won't come back.

Unfortunately many of the people who've left San Francisco have moved to Austin and are enacting exactly the same policies. It's already created a dramatic shift in the city, and I can easily see Austin strongly resembling San Francisco from a quality of life / lawfulness perspective in just 5-10 years.

Im a third generation Texan and welcome all the Californians and their politics.

Even in Austin, Texas is a backwards, overtly racist, pro-big business anti-small business state that hates “freedom” unless it has to do with guns or corporate protections.

By the way, we have so many homeless because other republican heavy cities ship them here. Google ‘Haruka Weiser’ for a pretty normal example of a cop from a small town picking up a mentally unstable transient and dropping them off in downtown Austin a couple of blocks near the university.

I think there are pros and cons to each policy position, but let's not kid ourselves, San Francisco is not the city to model yourself after. A lesson that unfortunately all the people fleeing SFO didn't learn when they landed in Austin.

I am glad to see that Austin has become more progressive in some ways, but being completely ineffectual in how we care for members of our community while enabling the worse consequences of untreated mental illness and homelessness isn't something to be happy about. The key factor here is "untreated". There are some cities in the US that are actually working in a positive direction to help the homeless communities in their area to improve their lives, rather than just giving them a free pass out of doors.

Homelessness is a major problem all across America, and it's also a very complex problem. There are no easy fixes, but there are some obvious things which make the conditions and problem worse. It'd be great if there were easy fixes, but the reality is that it's very difficult to help people unless they want to be helped, and there's very real human rights considerations to forcing people into mental health or addiction treatments. Our country tried that at one point too, and it also didn't end well.

"Our country tried that at one point too, and it also didn't end well."

In fact the mental health insttutions system of the 70's and earlier was very successful from what I've read about. It was the victim of a mass campaign of what we today would call "fake news" from activists. The result is the crisis you have today, where people that NEED help, even if they are incapable of understanding and consenting to it, can't get it and are left to fend for themselves on the streets.

Unfortunately, the horror stories about state mental hospitals in the US were true. Patients had no ability to leave of their own accord, even if they were reasonably of sound mind. Once committed, you were completely at the whim of the doctor(s). In many cases people had unnecessary and permanently damaging procedures done to them such as electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) or a frontal lobotomy. There are serious philosophical concerns around consent and patient rights when it comes to permanent involuntary commitment.

Absolutely. But it really feels like kicking the can down the road to try to deal with severe inequality just by decriminalizing theft. There has to be a better long-term solution.

People brazenly come into my Starbucks all the time and openly announce they are shoplifting, because they know that the police won't show up to take a report for at least an hour.

Once we do have the report, even if they do get caught, nothing happens. Many months of reports and multiple trips to the courthouse and we can MAYBE get a stay away order. Usually before that point, the store management has shuffled around enough that the person handling the legal legwork has moved on.

And then people get astonished when the righteous party doesn't get elected.

This economical view on Justice - ignore petty stuff because it is too expensive for the system to deal with it - destroys the goodwill on people and on State.

Public transit is a huge problem. Even if, say, my coworkers were willing to ride public transit, I'm not sure I'd be willing to be in the same room as them.

And to add to the roommate problem, I think a lot of people in sf led lives predicated on not spending that much time in their tiny housing. All of a sudden with everyone all home all the time... oof. You really need a separate office for each person so you're not spending 95% of your life in your bedroom. That's pretty unaffordable for most of the city.

My company bit the bullet and allowed permanent remote. Fifteen percent of our employees have already left sf. I suspect this will accelerate as leases expire.

Also, the stunning incompetence of sf government has led to property prices that are just stunning. A coworker bought a nice condo -- obviously elsewhere -- for less money than he was paying to have two roommates in sf. Getting out from under the ridiculous cost of living here leads to such a stark change in quality of life elsewhere.

The property prices are due to "stunning incompetence of SF government"? I'm not buying that. Public officials are not in charge of—nor do they have any real control over—property values. Your co-worker who bought property elsewhere wasn't able to do so because the mayor of that town was incredibly competent. That had absolutely nothing to do with it.

The board of supervisors routinely rejects housing projects, or puts them up for an absurd review process that involve things like banning buildings if they cast a sliver of shadow on a park (which would on the other hand be tremendously welcome these days). Several supervisors are landlords who are personally invested in keeping the supply low so that prices keep rising.

By contrast, Seattle has been building to keep up with demand and has been able to manage prices much more effectively. We could have had a Tokyo of the West. Instead, we're left with an emptying shell of a self-agrandizing suburb.

And who do you think effectively controls the BoS and planning commission? Voters. Landowning voters. Because by and large, they want to maintain the status quo.

(Full disclosure: I also own property in SF, but am in faor of all sorts of new housing, even that which will lower my home's value.)

Yes, especially in local elections, where participation is often ridiculously low, the electorate skews heavily toward long time, older residents, and more on the homeowner than the renter front. So the incentives are clear against new developments.

Edit: Thanks for supporting housing even against your financial interests. I’m on the same boat (across the bay). In my case I just want to live somewhere walkable without breaking the bank.

> By contrast, Seattle has been building to keep up with demand and has been able to manage prices much more effectively.

Do you live in Seattle? Because that's not what anyone who lives here who is not making a tech salary thinks.

There is enough new housing here that apt buildings went down in monthly cost last summer. People keep moving here so house prices have been stubbornly resilient.

According to this, Seattle rents doubled from 2010 to 2016 and have been fairly flat since then. SF seems to follow basically the same curve: up 1.5x from 2010 to 2016 then flat-ish.

https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-seattle-rent-tren...

https://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-ren...

That about matches this story, but some places had small drops and the hidden price reductions by keeping monthly price high but giving free months. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/renter-boo...

Maybe I was too much on the dropping side but the article says prices had been booming like you said for a decade and 10k units were filled and then prices stabilized.

The SF Board of Supervisors has a lot of control over the supply and has used it to make it very hard to build anything. High prices are a direct result of low supply.

I'm not sure I'd call it incompetence though, they are very motivated to keep existing landowners happy. Higher prices and fewer neighbors to deal with is an easy way to do that.

It's not incompetence, though thats what the BoS would like you believe of them. It's corruption, plain and simple, and it'll cost you a $50,000 bribe to start getting the permits. The latest expose is against Mohammed Nuru but look back across the decades and realize it's a recurring theme.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/It-st...

Example: Hillary Ronin is the supervisor for the mission. An area that was historically lower income minorities, now being displaced, in part due to a lack of housing units. She has fought for years to stop the construction of buildings that would add both affordable units and market rate units.

"Ronen fought to prevent the construction of a 75-unit building on the site of a laundromat. She argued that an environmental review of the building did not consider the impact of a shadow on a nearby schoolyard, even though an environmental review conducted by officials at the San Francisco Planning Department showed that the new construction, including its shadow, would not have an adverse impact on children at the schoolyard.]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Ronen

Starting at 7:41 in this video an interview with the same supervisor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw8MACDZ3RI&t=547s

The tax breaks that she is referring to were roughly $10mm/year. https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report-state/twitter...

The city's budget increased by nearly $6bn during the time the tax breaks were active (largely fueled by the growth from tech boom).

Yeah, the SF Board of Supervisors refuses to change the current zoning regime.

It’s totally the bos and not the nimby residents. /s

It's not really the residents as a whole. It's a small number of loud people who block change.

SF city “leadership” had failed the city miserably. What we’ve witnessed is that the city was actually really, really hard to destroy with A LOT going on for it. The pandemic just accelerated the demise - no other city even in CA has exodus quite like SF. This is all very sad as SF was such a beautiful city.

Why would anyone vote for the incumbents in SF’s next elections is beyond me.

If you are talking about the board of supervisors, I agree. They are to blame for many of the city’s problems, mostly because their most politically active constituents and donors are angry homeowners who block everything.

The current mayor London Breed has been doing good work, her handling of the covid-19 crisis in particular has been excellent. The problem is that most supervisors hate her and block her every step of the way.

I disagree about the mayor. But since I am not SF resident I won’t argue. I hope you enjoy what you are getting

Out of curiosity, if you’re not a SF resident, what are you basing your disagreement on? Do you live in a nearby city that is affected by SF policies?

yes, I live nearby and used to visit SF often. But now my wife is afraid to even drive to Cal Academy of sciences with kids.

Don't forget the frequent electricity outages, especially given its the tech capital of the world.

I lived in Hayes Valley, across Warby Parker, last year and our electricity went out 3-4 times for the whole night. We paid our bills on time.

Also pretending to like the Grateful Dead gets pretty annoying after a while

Homeless issues: Provide homes and mental health facilities

Who are the vandals? Why are they vandalizing? Are they related to the homeless problem?

Income/Property Taxes: Vote

Extremely high pre-COVID rents meant many adults were living in roommate situations that seem a lot less acceptable when your health is tied to the willingness of everyone in your unit to behave responsibly.

Unless you're practically retired, this is not a real issue given the COVID mortality profile. The sort of people who have flatmates tend to be younger, so the idea that COVID means nobody can or should have flatmates anymore isn't backed by any sort of medical reality.

But there does seem to be an issue here with the type of people who live in SF not seeming to perceive the risks around COVID correctly. Why is Google keeping their offices closed until 2021? All you have to do is look at the stats or the history of epidemics to realise that this doesn't make sense, especially for a workforce as famously young as Google's.

If you could establish an impregnable firewall between young healthy people and vulnerable people, and you ignore the rare deaths of healthy young people and side-effects of infection, the infection rate among young healthy people would be less important.

But establishing an impregnable firewall is impossible, and long as the boundary between groups is porous, a higher infection rate among the young and healthy will increase the infection rate among the vulnerable, and hence the death rate.

> Unless you're practically retired, this is not a real issue given the COVID mortality profile.

It certainly is if you are one of those odd individuals whose concern for your health involves more than just near-term mortality.

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